Friday, February 6, 2015

Too Hot to Touch

Modern society provides a long menu of predicaments to
inspire our nightmares.For a number of
years, climate change has been hogging the spotlight.It’s time to have more nightmares about radiation.Folks think that if we simply quit building
new reactors, the nuclear boo-boo will go away, and we can forget about it —
wrong!William and Rosemarie Alley have shed
much light on the subject with their book, Too
Hot to Touch.It reveals a
deeply embarrassing chapter that has been omitted from the glorious epic of
technology and progress.

Nuclear weapons were invented during World War II.Nagasaki and Hiroshima were turned into
ashtrays, but the enormous unintended consequences of half-baked genius have
dwarfed the destruction of two cities.We continue to create stuff that will remain extremely toxic for
millions of years, and none of it is stored in secure permanent facilities,
where it will cause no harm.

The war was followed by an arms race.A hundred new bombs were detonated at the
Nevada Test Range between 1951 and 1962.Nuke tests became a tourist attraction.Families sat in folding chairs at open-air spectator sites to see the
amazing mushroom clouds.A few minutes
after the blast, they were sprinkled with fine dust.Several decades later, the region became “the
thyroid cancer capital of the world.”

Lunatics became giddy with nuclear mania.Some wanted to blast a new canal across
Panama.Others dreamed of a
coast-to-coast waterway across the U.S.Others
wanted to nuke Gibraltar, and turn the Mediterranean into a freshwater
sea.In the Soviet Union, 120 bombs were
used for earthmoving projects.

In 1954, construction began on the first U.S. nuclear power
reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania.At
that time, nuclear waste was not seen to be especially dangerous.Robert Oppenheimer, at the Atomic Energy
Commission, referred to the issue of radioactive waste as “unimportant.”Experts were possessed by a stupefying blind
faith in scientific magic — there is a brilliant solution for everything!

They contemplated a variety of schemes for making high-level waste
disappear.Some recommended shooting it into
space, or burying it in sea floor clay beds.The Soviets disposed it via deep well injection, in a liquid form that
may not sit still for millions of years.The U.S., U.K., France, and the U.S.S.R. have dumped a lot of waste in
the oceans.The Irish have caught
contaminated lobsters and fish.

There are a number of radioactive elements and isotopes.All of them are unstable and become less
dangerous over time, degrading at varying rates of speed.Most forms of uranium are mildly
radioactive.The atoms that are heavier
than natural uranium are manmade, and some remain dangerous for millions of
years.Some are water soluble and highly
mobile.Some are picked up by plants and
animals, and are biomagnified as they move up the food chain.

Experts eventually realized that high-level radioactive
wastes were nastier than expected.They
had to be stored underground, in geologic repositories that would remain stable
for a million years.Serious research
began at an old salt mine in Kansas.Then,
a plutonium plant in Colorado burned, and high-level waste was shipped to
Idaho, where cardboard boxes of it were dumped into open trenches.The media reported the story, and the nation
soon realized that nutjobs were in charge of handling terrifically toxic dreck.This detonated high-level fear.Kansas promptly nuked the proposed repository.

The next hot prospect was Yucca Mountain, on the edge of the
Nevada Test Site.The government
invested $10 billion on 25 years of research.The objective was to prove that the site would be safe for a million
years.No place on Earth would be a
perfect site.Dr. Alley believed that
Yucca Mountain was close enough to ideal.(He spent years on the project, working for the U.S. Geological Survey.)

The core problem was that there were no politically suitable
sites in the entire U.S., because every state would fiercely oppose a
repository within their borders.The
public had a reasonable fear of high-level waste.They also had a reasonable lack of trust in
anything the government told them, after years of lies and deceptions.Nevada was no exception.The government’s nuclear testing had already
turned much of the state into a radioactive wasteland.

Obama was elected in 2008.Steven Chu was his Secretary of Energy.In March 2009, Chu announced, “Yucca Mountain was not an option.”He presented no explanations or
alternatives.Why did Chu kill the
project?“Virtually all observers
attributed the decision to pull the plug on Yucca Mountain as political payoff
to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada.Nevada was a swing state in the election, and
Obama had pledged to kill Yucca Mountain, if elected.”

So today, “there are some 440 nuclear power plants in 31
countries.More are on the way.Yet, no country on Earth has an operating
high-level waste disposal facility.”As
of 2012, American taxpayers were responsible for storing a growing collection
of high-level waste — 70,000 tons of spent fuel, and 20,000 canisters of
military waste.It’s being stored at 121
sites in 39 states.In 15 other nations,
60 nuclear reactors are being built.

Industrial civilization is doing a fabulous job of trashing
the planet’s atmosphere, forests, soils, oceans, aquifers, and
biodiversity.This is simply business as
usual, and most of humankind is staring at their cell phones.The future doesn’t matter — with the
exception of nuclear waste repositories.Almost no study has been devoted to the risks of doing nothing, and
letting the crap remain where it is forever.The Alleys steer around this red-hot issue, leaving readers to conjure
worst-case nightmares.

Let’s take a side trip to Google.The average U.S. reactor is 32 years
old.Reactors are licensed for 40
years.When a license is not renewed,
the reactor must be decommissioned, a process that often takes 60 years.First, the reactor is turned off, and the
fuel rods removed.Then, wait 50
years.This allows the radiation levels
in the facility to cool off, making it much safer for the remaining work to
proceed.The buildings and contaminated
soils are removed, and the site is restored to a harmless field.

Fuel rods have a working life of about six years.Then, the spent fuel, which is still highly
radioactive, is moved to cooling pools, where it must remain for at least five
years.Then, ideally, it is stored in
dry casks.If the pumps for the cooling
pool quit, the water boils, the pool evaporates, and the rods are exposed to
air.If the uranium pellets in the rods
are exposed to air, they melt, and begin releasing radioactive gasses.

The meltdowns at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima
were triggered by overheated fuel rods.Cleanup
efforts at Chernobyl are
hampered by the Ukraine’s wheezing economy.Around Chernobyl, citizens were permanently evacuated from a Zone of
Alienation, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island.

In the U.S., the planned geologic repository did not materialize
by the promised date, and no site has been approved, so spent fuel is piling up
at reactor sites.The Alleys note that
some U.S. pools have been loaded with four times more rods than they were
designed for, which increases potential risks.Moving the rods to safer dry casks would cost billions of dollars.

Are we feeling lucky?What will the world look like in 50 years?Will effective geologic repositories be built
in time?Fifty years from now, will we
have the oil, heavy equipment, transportation systems, functional governments, work
crews, and wisdom to safely decommission the existing 440 reactors, plus the
new ones being planned?Will all of the
reactors safely avoid disasters resulting from earthquakes, volcanoes, plane
crashes, warfare, equipment failures, human errors, and sabotage?

If we cared about the generations to come, and if we were
rational, what would a sane plan look like?Today, orbiting spacecraft passing in the night can clearly see the city
lights below.My grandparents, and
all of their ancestors, were born in homes without electricity.They managed to survive without light bulbs,
TVs, cell phones, or the internet.They
were good people who had satisfying lives.The lights cannot stay on forever.

Alley, William M. and Alley, Rosemarie, Too Hot to Touch,
Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013.

4 comments:

"Too cheap to meter" nuclear electricity never made any sense, was never cheap (to build or operate), has never been "carbon-free" nor safe, and was designed primarily as a way to justify the enormous public investment that went into the Manhattan Project (yet another civilian spin-off from war technology).

One of the most successful citizen rebellions in US history, however, was the grass-roots non-violent anti-nuclear power movement (in which I played a leadership role), which successfully shut down new construction in the US for 40 years. Of course, that did nothing to shutter the existing plants, which are now being slowly decommissioned at great cost.

It is possible to complete decommissioning in a lot less then 60 years, as the first large-scale commercial nuke - Yankee Rowe in western Massachusetts - which operated from 1960 to 1992, was fully decommissioned to a green field in five years. (I also indirectly assisted with that process by training an on-site high-angle rescue team, when I served as Emergency Management Coordinator in an abutting Vermont town.)

All that remains are 16 100-ton dry cask high-level waste storage containers, which cost $8 million per year for security, and with no prospects for ever leaving the site.